Blog Post #1

In this blog post, I am going to focus on telling you a story about an impactful experience while I was in middle school, and how it impacted my development pathway. I remember the details of the exact teacher and day of what we did. Looking back at the day now, I realize the effect it had on my development pathway. 

The impactful experience was in my 8th grade science classroom with Mr. Berg. Being in a science class in middle school our teacher loved to do group work, but it was never a whole class activity until the end of the year. We took about a week to prepare for this activity which was a mock trial situation, but it had the background scenes of detective work and actually finding out “Who Did It”. Someone in the class stole the Dwight Bobble Head which was Mr. Berg’s prized possession. We each got assigned a role for the activity which included, police, detectives, investigators, people trying to prove the defendant guilty, the people trying to prove the defendant not guilty, and the judge. The first thing we did to get this activity started was getting our fingerprints and shoe prints taken before the teacher assigned any roles. We got to use ink for our fingerprints, and we stepped on a piece of paper for our shoe prints which was super fun and interesting to learn about. This evidence went into a binder in which the investigators got to keep track of. The next step in the process was assigning the roles in which I was placed as a detective. On the day of collecting and investigating the crime in. We walked into class and a portion of the classroom was blocked off with caution tape and the bobble head was gone with a note saying something like “I took your prized possession, catch me if you can”. At this point, the detectives including me put on shoe covers and gloves and gathered evidence like a shoe print, the handwritten note, and a fingerprint on the glass case. When looking around the shoe print looked very familiar, and even though none of the other people knew who did it. It was me, I “did” the crime in which Mr. Berg randomly selected. I chose to keep this information on the down low because the evidence went to the investigators, and they were looking closely at the fingerprint and the shoe outline. They came to a conclusion of who did the crime, in which the police took their conclusion and “arrested” me to go to trial. The trial happened the next day in class in which evidence was put into question, and they found me guilty for the crime in which they were correct. Mr. Berg has selected me as the defendant, and they were correct in declaring me guilty. To get to that conclusion, we had to all work together as a team otherwise we would all be lost if we had missing pieces of evidence or missing people to make a trial work effectively. Teamwork was the lesson of this story which was very necessary for growth and development as transitioning into high school. 

This activity impacted my development pathway because it opened my eyes to working as a whole class to solve problems. It really helped me work on my communication skills and connections with my classmates that I did not usually get to work with. My development pathway changed for the greater good because of this activity. It really helped me realize the need for teamwork when trying to solve problems. If you do not have a missing piece to the puzzle you are never going to get the full picture. You need all pieces together to see the full picture in a wider sense. This activity helped me realize that teamwork is necessary for everything in a classroom. People bring different experiences into the classroom, and when you work together you can learn so many things to benefit you and your learning environment. If everyone was the same, we would not have half of the experiences or knowledge that we do.